Redmine is a project management web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. It is cross-platform and cross-database, and free to download and use as an open source project available on the GNU 2.0 license.
$0
per month
Replicon Polaris PSA
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Replicon Polaris PSA is a professional services automation platform containing project management, expense tracking, and billing features, from Replicon headquartered in Redwood City, California.
Redmine is a perfect solution for businesses that are looking for a FREE and open source solution for project management. It is great for teams that are managing numerous tasks or projects at one time. Redmine is easy to set up and is fairly self-explanatory for anyone who is semi tech-savvy.
It is perfect for inputing time sheets, time offs and expenses. It is hosted on the cloud, so accessible from anywhere, and even from mobile. It should nonetheless do just that, as it is not suited to track the work that you are doing or details about it. It is completely useless in that case.
The design and user-interface are a little outdated. It looks like a product that was designed ten years ago and doesn't have a polished look and feel like newer apps have.
It's not particularly designed to support agile-based project management methodologies such as Scrum.
Though the technical support staff are always very nice, sometimes they don't seem to understand exactly what the issue is based on our explanation. There have been several times when I've ended up solving the issue on my own without their assistance, despite numerous emails and phone calls. Could be a language barrier issue, perhaps they could receive more training in how companies are actually using the software on a daily basis.
Employee time sheets have to be approved by project managers and supervisors prior to my final approval. However, when viewing the time sheets in list form, there is no way for me to tell whether a time sheet has been approved by everyone else. I have to manually open each one and hover over the approver link. It would be helpful if there was a column in the list showing which approvers still need to approve it.
There have been a few times when time sheets were accidentally deleted by approvers. In order to retrieve them, we've had to contact Replicon support and have a backup instance of the information created. It would be great if perhaps there was some sort of archive or recently deleted section that could be accessed right away without having to go through Replicon support, a folder or something that would hold on to recently deleted files for a few days or a week just in case they needed to be retrieved.
Some of our projects have more than one project manager. Replicon currently allows for co-managers to be assigned to a project, but this status does not seem to include that co-manager in the approval of time sheets and expenses. We have had to manually create an approval path to include that second manager. It would be nice if co-managers would automatically be included in those approval paths.
Redmine is a great product to have in an organization. It's extremely flexible, costs much less to maintain than other alternatives, and as a tool, it is relatively fast to get experienced with. The primary advantages of working with Redmine are: flexible platform, API, open-source and highly configurable, stability.
Redmine is free, easy to use and it's everything you could want in a free project management program. The fact that it has wiki integration and that it can track on such a granular level is amazing. Assigning tasks to other users, such as our development team, is fantastic and ensures we are always up-to-date on where we are what - on what projects.
Jira is a great project management tool for software product life cycle management for an agile environment based on agile methodologies. Jira is an intuitive and modernized user interface design compared with Redmine but Redmine is a lightweight and affordable project management and task tracking solution with its essential features and functionalities.
We used to track time on JIRA on the tickets. This was good enough for time tracking, but didn't integrate efficiently with accounting software, so accountants had to replicate manually the data from JIRA to their software in order to bill clients. Using Replicon made things much easier for them.
Customers receive updates on all progress made for their issues -- this results in an informed customer who is being given transparency on all steps of our process.
Customers have responded well from being able to not have to track down emails and instead come to a central place for requests.
